


Camlann

by Ankaret



Category: Merlin (BBC)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-18
Updated: 2010-07-18
Packaged: 2017-10-10 15:49:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the morning before battle, Merlin helps Arthur put his armour on one more time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Camlann

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bedlamsbard](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=bedlamsbard).



> Spoiler warning for pretty much every version of the Arthurian legend, ever. :)
> 
> Thanks to DurAnorak for beta-reading!

It's twenty-five years since the Great Dragon died, and the morning is cold. Cold sky, cold moorland, cold wind flicking at the pennants on the tents like a child's bored finger, cold grey water in the crooked bend of the river. The horses stamp and blow clouds of breath into the frozen air.

The King's advisor wakes with a start and sits up, his shock of greying hair sticking up around his ears, the blankets sliding back and letting in ice-crystal prickles of morning air. He's thought about growing a beard, but Arthur would just say he looked like a prat, and, to be honest, he can't argue.

He wakes from dreams of another battle, long ago.

They'd hardly call it a battle now. A scuffle through the streets of a village, a pack of bandits pitted against one prince, one king's ward, two servants and a desperate rabble of untrained men and women, with the sudden stink of blood and death rising to the sky along with the smell of cowshit and clean washing; no, they wouldn't call that a battle. Not even a skirmish. They'd fought giants and kings and even the Roman Emperor between that day and this.

Merlin's thoughts slide forward another ten years, from his home village to Rome. He remembers the Emperor's haughty ways, and how Arthur had stamped up and down the stone balcony outside his rooms, seething.

"Call me a _little client-king!_ Me! That stuck-up, toffee-nosed, pass-me-a-minion-to-dust-my-laurel-leaves _pillock_ -" Arthur looked round at Merlin, whose mouth was twitching as it always did when he was suppressing laughter. _"What?"_

"He doesn't remind you of anyone?" Merlin said, resting his arms on the warm stone of the balcony and looking out at the steps and squares and lamplit windows of Rome.

Arthur raised his blond eyebrows, wondering whether to be outraged; and then decided he wasn't. He leaned on the balcony too and looked out over the city. It seemed to stretch forever. The night smelled of olive trees and dust. "I'm descended from Constantine the Great, I'll have you know. I've got a better claim to Rome than that git does."

"What was so great about Constantine?" said Merlin innocently.

"Didn't Geoffrey of Monmouth teach you _any_ history?"

"What, history, me? I was busy cleaning your stables and polishing your armour."

"_And_ not doing a very good job of it." Arthur looked southward, and Merlin knew that he was looking down to the lamps that flickered where the knights were quartered, and then to the Imperial barracks.

"We'll have to fight him," Arthur said after a moment. "Think we'll win?"

"You're the king. You know about this stuff, not me." Merlin made an effort. "We'll probably win."

"Damn straight." Arthur clapped him on the shoulder, trying to convince Merlin, trying to convince himself. "Course we'll win. We're not going to be beaten by a bunch of men in _skirts_."

_We'll have to fight them_. The older Merlin almost thinks he hears the words, spoken in that much younger Arthur's voice; but then he thinks he hears a lot of voices, these days, whispering in his ear at the solstices of sleep or waking. Gaius's voice, sometimes. Uther's.

Nimueh's.

The flap of his pavilion flutters open, letting in the boy Taliesin, with a towel over his arm and a bowl of hot water. "My lord Merlin!"

Merlin swings his legs out of the bed. The muscles ache now, more than they did ten years ago. "I'm nobody's lord," he says, wearily, for at least the ninety-eighth time.

Taliesin nods eagerly. "Yes, my lord."

Merlin wonders whether he failed to listen to Gaius with quite the same wide-eyed and muddle-headed dedication that Taliesin commits to not listening to him. At least he didn't go off into corners and practice the harp for hours on end. He can imagine what Arthur would have said if he'd expressed a desire to learn the harp.

Taliesin's harp is in the corner of the tent; his dark eyes slide longingly towards it, but he dutifully goes about the task of laying out Merlin's clothes and swordbelt, and removing the water and towel once Merlin has washed. Outside the tent, the camp is waking up. The shadows of men and horses go by.

Taliesin clasps his hands in the small of his back and stands to attention. He is a handsome boy, with tightly curled dark hair and clear nut-brown skin. He's some kind of connection of Queen Guinevere's on her father's side, and young enough not to remember when his family were born to anything but clean linen sheets and people bowing to them in the street. Merlin frowns. The Queen is yet another matter that one doesn't mention to the King these days.

"What is it, lad?" he asks kindly, because otherwise Taliesin is fully capable of standing there, quivering with news, but not wanting to interrupt the man who stands at the King's right hand, from now until sundown.

Taliesin bursts into speech. "It's the King's squire. Young Bedivere?"

Merlin nods patiently. He remembers three generations of Bediveres in Arthur's service, but nothing will persuade Taliesin to drop the belief that squires, and knights for that matter, are all alike in his master's view of the world, and all below his notice.

"Well, you know how he fell off his horse yesterday and broke his arm?" says Taliesin in a rush. "Well, he's no better, and Sir Lucan says he should lend the King his squire, and Sir Blamore says he should lend the King _his_ squire, and they've all but come to blows about it, and – "

Merlin draws his robe about his shoulders. It is fine cloth, lined with squirrel fur, and it comforts his aching bones as he goes to look out of the door of the pavilion. The cold makes his skin feel thinner than usual, and more stretched. This is no season for battle. He looks out over the bend in the river, at the _other_ encampment beyond the rushing water.

There are so many of them. Their standard, planted where Arthur's men cannot help seeing it, is made of bones and branches wired together under a boar's gaping skull. The shoulders of the thing are wrapped in mistletoe, the symbol of the Old Religion.

So many men and so much magic. None of them – no two or three or four of them together – could stand against Merlin's magic; he is the greatest sorceror in the kingdom, and the King's protector.

But there are so many. The wind makes shivers in the fur where Merlin pins it closed at his throat, and stirs the robe's heavy hem.

"We can't afford to lose good knights in a stupid brawl," Merlin says, sensibly, resisting the urge to murmur the words that will deprive Lucan and Blamore of speech, or possibly turn them into mice. This is no morning to be squandering magic. "They'll have someone to fight soon enough. Go and tell them _I'll_ help the King on with his armour."

"But, my _lord_!" Taliesin says in honest shock.

"It's not like I've never done it before." Merlin looks at Taliesin; thinks about wrestling with saddles and tack, and decides that there are limits to his generosity towards his King. "_You_ can go and get the royal horse ready."

Taliesin looks appalled, but he gives a courtly bow, and goes off smoothing down his red woollen tunic in preparation for the struggle ahead. Merlin isn't sure whether the boy is more dismayed by the prospect of facing the quarreling Sir Lucan and Sir Blamore, or the horse.

The King's pavilion is the biggest of all, set on a small rise in the frozen ground. Two guards stand at the door. They salute Merlin, fists bumped against breastplates. They both look worried. And young.

Inside the tent, furs and rugs are piled high on the cold ground, and a brazier burns beside the bed. The bed is magnificent. It was carried in pieces all the way from Camelot on a packhorse, and it hasn't been slept in. The King sits wrapped in a cloak and frowns at a map laid out on a small table.

"Oh, it's you," he says, looking up. The years have been kind to him, on the whole, though his fair hair isn't as thick as it was, nor his waist so slender. There is a look of Uther about his face sometimes, especially since he got the scar. "Where's my squire?"

"Broken his arm, remember? I'll dress you."

"You're out of practice." Arthur stretches, shrugs the cloak off, flings his thin tunic after it, and washes. The skin of his back is thickened with old sword-cuts. He winces as he rotates his left shoulder experimentally forward, then backward. The line of an old scar flexes with it, like a crimped red ribbon. "It's no better."

"I'll make you up some more of Gaius's mixture."

"I never had aches and pains like this when Gaius was court physician," says Arthur, unfairly, cradling one wrist in the other hand and bending it to and fro, closing and unclosing his fingers. "You saw he's got the Druids with him?"

For half a moment, Merlin thinks Arthur means his old master Gaius, long since buried at Camelot with all honour. But there is only one _he_ these days. "Mordred? Yes."

"Bastard."

"The Druids practice the marriage laws of the Old Religion."

"You know exactly what I mean." Arthur lifts his arms for undertunic and padded silk arming-jack to be slid over his fair head. "I can't _believe_ I left him in charge whilst I went off to sort out Gawain's problems for him, and he pulled a stunt like this. I swore I'd judge people by who they were, and not just by whether or not they wielded magic. I swore I wouldn't be like my father. And now I get tricked by a sorceror, just like he did."

"There's worse people to be like than your father."

"Tell me about it." Arthur lets out his breath and settles his shoulders under the mailshirt. It is a familiar weight, and almost a welcome one. "He cast a long shadow."

"So will you."

"You're sure about that, aren't you?" Arthur tries to look over his shoulder as Merlin arranges his surcoat at the back, and earns himself a reproachful look and a smack on the shoulderblade to make him turn round again. "Can you imagine it? People telling stories about _us_?"

"Maybe they'll be funny stories," says Merlin, reaching round to clasp the King's belt. Arthur sucks his breath in. The King still has his vanity. "Maybe they'll say you were the ugliest King ever to rule in Camelot, and you spent all your time stealing pigs, or something. Maybe they'll say I got the girl."

"They'll say you had a beard down to your knees, and you wore a pointy hat," says Arthur, a breath of laughter in his voice. "A really stupid pointy hat."

"I think Taliesin may already be writing a song about us," says Merlin in the tones of one giving unavoidable news of a fatal illness. "Well, mostly about you."

"You listen to it for me, and tell me if it's any good," says Arthur. He sits down and starts pulling his socks on, whilst Merlin gathers up vambraces and boots. After so many years, they both know the rhythm of this. Whatever happens in the rest of this cold day, this at least is familiar. This, at least, is comfort. Some things are certain.

Outside the pavilion, the bustle of the morning kicks up a notch. Knights and servants hurry by, busy with everything from new-painted shields to fodder for the horses. Sir Lucan and Sir Blamore get into an argument about who is the better at killing snakes. There is a clamour at the northern guard-point; a herald sighted, crossing the river in a boat. Taliesin brings breakfast.

"What _is_ this?" says Arthur, turning the burnt something over with the point of his knife.

"At least it's not rat, Sire. Or bathwater," says Merlin.

Arthur grins at him. The same heartbreaking grin, after all these years, even though the scar lifts one side of his lip further than the other now. Taliesin is far too well-trained to ask whether the King and his advisor have lost their minds, though the shock shows on his unlined young face. Sir Blamore's squire and Sir Lucan's arrive at the same moment, both imploring the King's interest for their masters in the matter of the vanguard.

"Tell them _both_ that if I have any more trouble out of them they'll be guarding the baggage train," says Arthur, pulling on his gauntlets. "I'm going out to meet the herald. With me, Merlin."

Merlin follows his King out of the tent and down the slope. The cold stings his cheeks. The sun stings his eyes. His boot-soles skid on the frosty grass.

Down beyond the camp, he can see the boat at the riverbank, and beyond it Mordred's camp. No doubt it is as full of confusion and horse-apples and badly cooked breakfast as the King's encampment, but just for that frost-etched moment, it looks like a scene out of the land of the Sidhe. The banners fly crisply in the cold breeze, the tents are bright. It _shines_, as Camelot did, once upon a time.

Merlin's eyes glint golden in the sun.


End file.
